Authority Collapse Before Mutation

This paper introduces the concept of authority collapse as a structural requirement for governance in autonomous and agentic systems. As decision signals become distributed across agents, evaluators, policy engines, and tools, systems must converge these signals into a single admissibility decision before state mutation becomes reachable. The paper argues that effective governance cannot occur after execution has begun; once mutation becomes reachable, governance mechanisms can only observe or audit outcomes rather than constrain them. By situating authority resolution before the execution boundary, the analysis highlights a recurring architectural pattern found across domains such as databases, financial settlement systems, CI/CD pipelines, and safety-critical control systems. The work proposes a structural model for understanding governance in distributed autonomous systems and explores its implications for emerging agent architectures.